Private-Label Case Study : AccessMyLibrary.com

For more than 50 years, The Gale Group, a part of Cengage Learning, has served the world's information and education needs with its vast and dynamic content repositories. Students, librarians, teachers and information professionals have accessed research material and found answers to their questions from the books, magazines, microfilm, databases and other formats made available by The Gale Group at their local library.

The Gale Group’s next step in extending the reach of this vast amount of information was to make it available to library patrons through the World Wide Web. From that idea, AccessMyLibrary.com was born.

To bring this enormous amount of information to users through the Web would take a lot of planning, and questions on how to do it loomed.

“When we planned for AccessMyLibrary.com, we knew there would be challenges. How do we manage 30 million articles? How do we bring visitors to the site? How can our visitors use their library cards to access content? How do we generate revenue from the site without disrupting the user experience? ECNext helped us answer all those questions,” said Eric Hoss, Manager of Web Initiatives for The Gale Group.

The Value of ECNext

"Today, AccessMyLibrary.com is one of the most trafficked, trusted and reliable information sites on the Internet. The combination of Cengage's premium content and ECNext's technology, platform and marketing has proven to be the perfect combination."

ECNext is an online media company that puts the Web to work for end-users seeking information, publishers seeking to disseminate information and advertisers trying to reach the right audience at the right time. The two companies have worked closely together since the launch of AccessMyLibrary.com in January of 2006.

The Gale Group and ECNext created AccessMyLibrary.com as a free resource for library users that is supported by the site’s advertising revenue. This allows library patrons to use AccessMyLibrary.com to find the same premium magazines and publications available at their libraries--all at no cost. With nearly 30 million articles from more than 5,000 magazines, journals and periodicals covering everything from astronomy to zoology, AccessMyLibrary.com now is one of the largest information resources for magazine publications on the Web.

It was important that AccessMyLibrary.com be easy to find and use and, since the publications are time sensitive, the content needed to be up-to-date and searchable. This is where ECNext’s marketing services and proprietary platform came in. ECNext designed the site to be user-friendly, with the content updating multiple times a day.

Spreading the Word

ECNext also reached out to users through word of mouth marketing campaigns to let people know where this great new service from The Gale Group resides. As Hoss explains: “ECNext provides the platform that allows users to use search engines to find the publications that reside at AccessMyLibrary.com, and then also organize, manage and serve the 30 million articles to the site’s patrons. Thanks to ECNext, visitors to AccessMyLibrary can quickly find information on just about any topic, then, using their library card, or creating a virtual library card online, visitors can immediately access their content.” 

Hoss goes on to explain, “ECNext has amazing contextual targeting expertise. When a visitor conducts a search on AccessMyLibrary, not only do they find relevant articles, they are served relevant, highly targeted advertisements as well.”

AccessMyLibrary.com is a truly amazing Internet resource for people that want 24/7, immediate access to their favorite magazines and publications.

“The same information you would find on the shelves of your local library, from popular consumer magazines, to academic journals, to trade publications are available online at www.accessmylibrary.com,” says Hoss. “Today, AccessMyLibrary.com is one of the most trafficked, trusted and reliable information sites on the Internet,” Hoss said.

 “The combination of Cengage’s premium content and ECNext’s technology, platform and marketing has proven to be the perfect combination.”

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